The chairman and chief executive of Pier 1 Imports Inc., Marvin Girouard, will retire from the unprofitable home-furnishing retailer and its board early next year, the company said. Girouard has been at Pier 1 for 32 years, the last seven in his current positions. He will retire Feb. 28. "I feel that it is time for me to leave in the course of a normal retirement and allow new leadership to emerge and flourish," he said in a statement released Saturday.

Joshua Dean Hall just wanted to catch a few more waves before sundown. He had surfed especially well in practice Thursday morning and appeared to be on the verge of making the 12-man traveling squad of the Huntington Beach High School surfing team, winner of 16 national championships. But when he returned to the beach to surf on his own that afternoon, he attempted to ride a wave beneath the Huntington Beach Pier, slammed into a concrete piling and drowned.

A group of gun owners who gathered Saturday on the Redondo Beach Pier to extol the virtues of the 2nd Amendment found themselves confronting a different hot-button legal issue: Redondo Beach Municipal Code 4-35.20 (a). Passed by the City Council in May, the ordinance prohibits guns in public parks. The city attorney says the pier is a park. Members of South Bay Open Carry, an organization that promotes a California law that allows people to openly carry unloaded weapons, say the pier is a commercial district.

A 13-month-old boy tumbled off the city pier and fell 25 feet into the ocean waves Tuesday, only to be rescued by his baby-sitter who plunged in after him and, later, by a lifeguard. Felipe Muddah was feeding birds on the pier with baby-sitter Colleen Logsdon and her husband, Chris, at 1:50 p.m. when he suddenly chased the flock, ran into a bench and careened through a one-foot space in the rail, plummeting into the 3-foot-high surf below, officials said.

It was an hour after sunset on the Ocean Beach pier, and Bill Forrey, like dozens of other hoopnetters around him, was poking around the ocean floor, hoping to come up with a lobster. With the powerful grace of a discus thrower, he tossed his baited, circular net over the pier railing, watched it splash into the surface and slowly sink to the rocky bottom. Then he waited.

The USS Intrepid, pried from the mud at its Hudson River pier and towed away 19 months ago for renovation, needs money -- lots -- if it is to resume its career as a floating museum. A job first estimated at $65 million to $70 million is now expected to cost $110 million, including work on the pier.

Redondo Beach resident Robert McLaughlin won the first Redondo Beach Pier Fishing Championship, landing a 17-pound halibut to top 74 entries. The contest began June 1. The top 10 finishers will receive prizes in a ceremony at 6 p.m. today on the pier.

Think texting and walking is no problem? Well, maybe you should talk to Bonnie Miller, a Michigan woman who recently fell off a pier while texting and walking at the same time. "I can't let pride get in my way of warning other people to not drive and text or walk and text. It's quite dangerous," Bonnie Miller told ABC 57, a local television station in South Bend, Ind. Miller plunged into the water this month when she was out for a stroll with her husband and 15-year-old son. As the family ambled down the pier, enjoying the weather, Miller remembered she needed to change an appointment.